1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to call center provisioning, management, supervision, and to call prioritization, queuing, disposition, and routing.
2. Background
Organizations with more than trivial needs for customer interaction often use call centers to provide services to their customers and to organize sales personnel. A call center is the means by which an organization, e.g., company or “enterprise,” handles customer and other calls, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a call center can handle a considerable volume of inbound and outbound calls at the same time, screen inbound calls, forward them to agents (e.g., customer service representatives) with appropriate skills, and maintain records of the calls and of the call center agents. Call centers have traditionally been used by mail-order catalog companies, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, and other similar organizations that use the telephone to sell or support their products and services.
Many call centers use computer-telephony integration (CTI), also known simply as “computer telephony,” to process telephone calls. These terms refer to the use of computers in managing the calls. Since the advent of the information technology revolution, companies have increasingly felt the need to interact with their customers through alternative communication channels that include, for example, facsimile transmissions, email, and web-based contacts. The alternative channel contacts are generally susceptible to CTI-based processing at least to the same extent as conventional telephone calls, and the benefits of computer-based management apply to them as well.
Here, as in the parent patent documents, by “call” we mean any kind of customer interaction, including, without limitation, facsimile transmissions, email messages, and web-based contacts such as chats. The intended meaning of “caller” is the same as the intended meaning of “customer”: it is the person or entity with whom the interaction takes place; unless specific context indicates otherwise, the caller/customer need not be the originator of the interaction.
A typical modern call center is a complicated technological amalgam of hardware and software that may reside, in whole or in part, on a telecommunications network. Provisioning such a call center for an enterprise can be a lengthy, technically involved process performed by “integrators”—technicians, engineers, and programmers highly skilled in combining computer equipment, telecommunication equipment, and software from various manufacturers. Consequently, the time and costs involved in provisioning a call center may be substantial, and the ability to minimize them may provide an important competitive advantage. It is therefore desirable to enable provisioning call centers quickly and without massive efforts of trained and highly compensated specialists.
A call center may include the capability to route a received call based on the call's attributes, such as information carried by the call, information submitted by the caller before the call is routed, and information regarding the caller stored in the call center's database or otherwise available to the call center. Similarly, the call center may include the capability to prioritize handling and disposition of the call based on these attributes. As used in this document, to prioritize means to determine or set the order for dealing with items, to establish priorities for a set of items; prioritization is the noun derivative of the verb prioritize.
Call centers are often provisioned and hosted for clients-subscribers by providers of telecommunication services, for example, long distance telephone carriers (Telcos) and application service providers (ASPs). Thus, provisioning a call center may involve discussions between the representatives of a long distance carrier and an enterprise to define, for example, functionality of the call center; its limitations; and the capabilities available to the enterprise, such as the number and skills of the enterprise's agents. The definitions tend to be made without sufficient precision, necessitating redesigns with their concomitant additional delays and costs. It would be beneficial to provide a high-level design tool for defining and provisioning a call center, and to push out the design tool's interface to a subscriber, to enable the subscriber to self-provision and administer a call center using non-technical employees, with little involvement by the service provider, such as an ASP or a Telco. It would also be beneficial for the high-level design tool to provide the ability to define call queuing priority rules based on parameters that include call attributes.